Tuesday, September 12, 2017

“The Persians, it would
appear, like the Phœnicians, made an analysis of human speech, which shows it
to be composed of comparatively few fundamental sounds, and adopted a
relatively simple cuneiform character to represent each one of these sounds. In
this script the inscriptions of the Persian kings—in particular of Darius and
his immediate successors—were written. There was another modification made by
the Persians, as witnessed by these inscriptions, which, if not so important,
had considerable practical value; namely, the use of a uniform oblique line to
separate different words in an inscription. To the modern reader it seems
strange that the ancient nations, with the exception of the Persians, should
have had the uniform custom of writing their letters or syllabic characters in
an unbroken series with no space or sign to indicate the division into words.
This was as true of the ancient Greek inscriptions as of those of Egypt and
Mesopotamia. It was left to the Persians to discover the practical value or
convenience of indicating the separation between words. That such a custom came
into vogue in Persia was perhaps due to the fact that the people there were
widely educated, it being customary to teach all children of the better classes
to read, as was probably never the case with any other of the oriental
nations.We have already seen how
valuable this custom of separating the words in their inscriptions has been to
the modern investigator of the cuneiform writing. But for the fact of the
Persian alphabet and the added fact of division of sentences into words in
writing, the cuneiform script, on which the modern science of Assyriology is
founded, might much longer have defied attempts to decipher it.”

~ excerpt from 25-volume “The Historian’s
History of the World” (1907) by H. S. Williams…

…The genius of Iranians since the Age of
Antiquity is in being modernists without losing their national identity… part
of being a modernist requires cultural adaptability and flexibility…if Iranians
adopted something foreign, they had a knack for making the best modifications
to suit their Iranian style… for example, and with all due respect to my
southern European ancestry, here is a pic of Persian version of spaghetti… http://fae-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Macaroni-2.jpg
...

Beyond yummy!

…also despite Persians being Asiatic
(Oriental) Iranians, other Iranian tribes lived in Europe such as Scythians,
Sarmatians, Alans, etc…so Iranians just like their distant cousins the Greeks
are Asiatic AND European…

[pic iranicaonline: Note the “word divider”
symbol at the bottom of the image which Williams claimed was an Iranian novelty
in the early development of writing…for educational purposes only]